You wake up one morning and go through your routine. While taking a shower (where else?), you get an inspired brainwave. Maybe you read an article the day before or heard something during a discussion that triggered the brainwave. Your brain worked silently overnight, and inspiration just popped into your head, apparently from nowhere. Now your thinking of taking inspired action on your idea.
This idea could change your life, maybe the lives of your family, friends and loved ones, or even change the world. Yes, grandiose as that seems, every world changing idea entered someone’s head during a moment of inspiration (but not necessarily during a shower ?)
By inspiration, I mean the desire to act on something positive. Getting pissed off with your neighbor or co-worker and finding inspired ways to irritate them is NOT what this is all about!
What do you do with your inspiration?
What do you do when you’re inspired? Do you ignore your idea? Do you write it down with the intention of acting on it later? Or do you act on it immediately or very soon – within the next hour or so?
Believe it or not, how soon you act on your inspiration makes a huge difference to whether you act on your inspiration at all! The sooner you act on your inspiration, the more likely it is that you will act on it. If you don’t act soon, you end up forgetting about it completely, or your idea just “gathers dust” in a list.
I’ve got tons of ideas neatly categorised in tons of lists in an app – all making some app developer somewhere very happy and maybe marginally richer, but for some reason, when I revisit those ideas after a few days or weeks, there’s no inspiration energy that propels me to act.
Hurdles to immediate action:
So why don’t we act on it immediately? In my case, some of the reasons turned out to be:
- I realise that it is a lot of work and I want to wait till I can schedule a large chunk of time.
- Sometimes I want the idea to “get in line”. There’s a queue of things I want to do so “now is not the right time”. I don’t want my inspiration to interfere with my plan. To paraphrase John Lennon – Inspiration is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.
- At other times, I’m already in the middle of a task and I don’t want to interrupt it even when it is something routine that I could easily postpone. Routine tasks have an addictive power and massive habit energy stored that create a huge gravitational attraction to them. Checking messages on a phone may be worse than cocaine!
- I’m genuinely busy with an existing inspired task. This happens often enough, because being in an inspired state creates more inspiration, and more ideas.
What are your reasons for not acting immediately on inspiration? Mind you, I’m not suggesting that it is always possible or even desirable to act immediately, but it helps to know that there is really something important in the way as opposed to something irrelevant.
What if you were forced to act on your inspiration?
Just imagine your boss (which could be you, if you’re self-employed) or an important client asked you, “I need you to do X urgently. It is top priority. Drop everything else and get this to me within the next 3 hours (days, weeks).” What would you do? Chances are, you would act on it immediately. At any rate, you wouldn’t ignore it, or not for long anyway.
Why is that? Because consequences! External requests have consequences. They are offers you tell yourself you cannot refuse! Whereas inspiration is internal – most likely coming from someone you don’t really pay attention to: YOURSELF.
Positive feedback loop: Virtuous Circle
Inspiration makes your life so much sweeter. You wake up in the morning, raring to go. Every time you act on your inspiration and take it to completion, you find that you receive more inspiration! A positive feedback loop gets established.
In fact, inspiration is the gateway to making real positive changes in your personal and professional life. The best part is that Inspiration brings with it a lot of (short term) energy that you can use to act, to make something new, to make changes – big or small in your life. And that will have a ripple effect.
- Arthur Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet – his first Sherlock Holmes novel – in 3 weeks! He used his inspiration to complete the book.
- Mozart used inspiration to compose. He is said to have transcribed music that he “heard” and composed an entire symphony in 3 days!
Inspiration will literally feel as if “someone else” is providing the ideas as well as the fuel to act on those ideas. That someone else is your Higher Self.
However, it is acting immediately on positive inspiration that matters: Routine tasks are not necessarily going to get you ahead – get a promotion, start a new business, or even something relatively small like writing a blog post! ? But positive action on an idea can lead to real solid, long term benefits.
Vicious circle: what happens when you ignore inspiration
On the other hand, when you ignore inspiration, then what message are you sending yourself? What are you telling yourself? – That your inspiration is not important? That it is not worth the effort? Ignoring inspiration continuously or actively suppressing inspiration simply creates a negative spiral that will make it harder for your “higher self” to send more inspiration your way.
Every time you ignore inspiration, you are telling yourself: I don’t matter, I come last, I probably wouldn’t be able to finish it anyway! The Dark Side arises. Fear, Anxiety, Unease. Maybe even anger at all the things you know you needed to do. It feels like it is just easier to suppress all that and go back to whatever you’re doing.
But there is a massive price to pay when you ignore inspiration. You become more unconscious. Your creative muscles become weaker (than they already are).
How loud is your inspiration?
Maybe the better question is: how sensitive is your hearing towards inspiration? Because most inspiration starts at a soft, quiet level. It is only when you pay attention that it grows to a deafening roar (in a few cases). Eureka does not happen daily, but to get to Eureka you must practice listening and acting daily.
You may act on your inspiration and find out that it did not turn out to be something awesome. Personally, this happens occasionally, less often than I expect, but it does happen. My imagination went hyper, collided with reality and ended up in the casualty ward.
No big deal, because, the upside of working on ideas immediately is so large, that the occasional dud does not really make a difference. NOT acting on ideas with potentially large impact can make a huge difference though, so its better to treat it as an experiment and do it anyway.
The story of the two wolves
There is a beautiful Cherokee legend, where a man is teaching his grandchild to deal with anger. He tells his grandkid that there are two wolves inside each of us. One of them is peaceful and does not harm anyone. This wolf does not get upset easily and forgives or overlooks often. He fights when there is a clear injustice and there is no other way to deal with the injustice.
The other wolf is an anger demon. He prowls around imagining that everyone is out to get him. He loses his temper at the tiniest of things and explodes with anger all over the place. Anger and hatred blind him and no one around him is comfortable with his way of dealing with anger.
The two wolves are in conflict with each other inside us and are constantly struggling with each other to become dominant.
The grandchild asks, “Which one wins?”
“The one you feed,” replies the Old Indian.
So, do you feed the inspiration wolf? How much and how regularly?
In Conclusion
Inspired action can only happen when you act immediately on inspiration and don’t sleep on it. Set aside some time during the early part of the day to do “inspired” work
Acting from a place of inspiration may seem hard, but in fact it is the easiest thing. The real challenge is that we’re unfamiliar with that process, not having acted a lot from inspiration.
That is the subject of my next post: Inspired Action Part 2: How to use Inspired Action to get real, long term results.
